By itself, our first-hand experience of Nebilyer warfare affords little basis for generalization, since it is limited to one battle. But since it is rare to find any first-hand accounts in the anthropological literature on New Guinea warfare, it seems worthwhile for us to report on the battle in some detail. This should provide a useful supplement to other accounts such Meggitt (1977) and Koch (1974, War and Peace in Jalema). As it turns out, our experience largely corroborates those descriptions, and also provides some new evidence bearing upon the relationship between oratory, warfare, and exchange.

The battle took place on January 6, 1986. It was fought as an episode in hostilities between two regional tribe-pairs, here called Peraka-Parka and Musika-Malka, which at that time had been going on for about two years. This battle took place on the north slopes of a ridge which lies between Musika-Malka country to the south and Peraka-Parka country to the north. Except for one large eucalyptus tree at its crest, the ridge is covered by kunai grass (see Plate 9). Early on the morning of the fighting, and several times throughout the day, that grass was fired, partly in order to increase visibility across the battlefield and remove potential hiding places. The ridge is clearly visible from a neighboring area dense in homesteads some three kilometers to the north, and seeing it fired, people there correctly surmised that there would be fighting on that day (notwithstanding an earlier report that it was to start on another day). A party of men (including Alan) set out to watch, and arrived on the scene at 11.30 a.m.

In Chapters 5, 6 and 7 we have discussed some of the linguistic structures of segmentary politics, and what was done with them at three separate exchange events (in considerably more detail for the first two events than for the third), In this chapter we shall be attempting to draw out some implications of that analysis for the general questions raised in Chapter 1 about wealth exchange transactions. Before we can do that, we must first resume the discussion of segmentary structures and exchange which was opened in Chapter 3. Having now looked in some detail at two exchange events, we are in a position to elaborate upon that discussion in ways that may clarify the relationship between the two spheres (i.e., segmentary structure and exchange). This we will attempt to do in section 8.1, where we will argue that segmentation, exchange, and warfare are alternative moments within a single integrated order of practical/conceptual activity. That ‘traditional’ (bo) order is one which, as the events make clear, is in at least some contexts treated by Ku Waru people as incompatible with the highly valued, newer order of gavman lo and bisnis. In section 8.2., we consider the question of how these two orders are or are not brought into conflict with each other, an issue about which there is more to say in light of the general model developed in section 8.1.

In section 8.3, we return to the more general questions of structure and event to which this book is ultimately addressed. In particular, we re-open the question raised about ceremonial exchange in section 1.2: Who transacts with whom?

This book presents an extended, ethnographically-based argument concerning the relationship between social structures and action, focusing upon speech as a salient aspect of the latter. Evidence for our argument is drawn from seventeen months of fieldwork which we conducted jointly between June 1981 and November 1983 in the Nebilyer Valley, Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea.

Even before going to New Guinea, we had always felt acutely the lack of successful integration of language-focused studies into mainstream ethnography. We sensed that this lack was due, not to the irrelevance of such material to ethnographic description and social theory, but to the much more fundamental problem of treating situated social action (including speech) as an object of ethnographic description and analysis. Our field time in the Nebilyer Valley not only strengthened our general conviction that there is a need to develop analyses of social action (integrating its linguistic and other aspects), but also provided us the opportunity to be present at many kinds of events which seemed to demand analysis in terms which could better reveal the relationship between structures and action. This volume is our attempt to provide such an analysis.

The research on which the book is based was undertaken during a first, exploratory trip during June to August, 1981, and then for 14 months between 1981 and the end of 1983. Two interruptions were necessitated by our involvement in Aboriginal land claims in Australia. These rapid transitions from the New Guinea Highlands to Aboriginal Australia and back were unsettling, but also had the positive effect of making differences between the two situations stand out in even greater relief than they otherwise might have.

THE NATURE OF KU WARU SEGMENTARY STRUCTURES

As already suggested by our opening vignette in Chapter 1, social action among the Ku Waru people (as in many other parts of the New Guinea Highlands) is structured partly in terms of named, quasi-agnatic social identities which bear some formal similarities to the segmentary lineages of classical descent theory (as in, e.g. Fortes 1953). Among Nebilyer people, those social identities are known generically as talapi. Talapi figure centrally in the events analyzed in Chapters 6 to 8, and so it is important here to provide full background details concerning the nature of these identities in general, and the history and structure of some of the particular talapi which are involved in those events.

In most respects, Ku Waru segmentary structures are similar or identical to those which have been extensively discussed in the Melpa ethnography mentioned in section 2.4 above. In view of this similarity, and given the extraordinarily high quality and thoroughness of the Strathern corpus, the present account of talapi will not be offered as a general introduction to the subject (for which, see A. Strathern 1972), but as an attempt to explicate aspects of talapi structure which are particularly relevant for our analysis of the events in Chapters 6 and 7, and for the model to be developed out of it in Chapter 8. To that end, and given the sort of controversies we have already reviewed concerning talapi-like social identities among the neighboring Enga and elsewhere in the Highlands (section 1.2), what is required here is less a matter of new empirical detail, than of how to construe certain largely familiar details in relation to existing anthropological models.

Having introduced the Ku Waru people and their ways of making segmentary social relationships, we turn now to some aspects of their social life which are partly consistent with that order of sociality and partly independent of it: ceremonial exchange and marriage. This will provide further necessary background for our analysis of events in Chapters 6 and 7, where we will explore some ways in which the significance of exchange transactions for these various dimensions of sociality is contested.

STRUCTURE AND HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBILYER CEREMONIAL EXCHANGE

New Guinea Highlanders are renowned for their elaborate systems of ceremonial exchange. The moka system of the Melpa people – eastern neighbors of the Nebilyer people – has been described in a monograph by Andrew Strathern (1971) and in many other publications by him and Marilyn Strathern. To the north-west, the tee system of the Enga has been described by Feil, Meggitt, and others (see section 1.2, references therein and below). In most respects, the ceremonial exchange practices of the Nebilyer, called makayl, resemble the Melpa moka more than the Enga tee. In the Nebilyer, all makayl (or moka) is claimed to have originated in claims for compensation arising out of warfare (cf. A. Strathern 1971:94ff. regarding the Melpa). Sometimes the parties between whom a makayl relation is established are ones who are said to have fought against each other. But in by far the majority of cases, they are parties who are said to have fought together as allies. Where the former is the case, the makayl transactions are talked about as a way of converting the relationship to an amiable one of wealth exchange.

In this chapter we develop conclusions in quite a different way than we did in Chapter 8 – by attempting to characterize some of the constitutive dimensions of Nebilyer social action more broadly, widening the scope of our consideration from the public events we have examined to some aspects of everyday Nebilyer social life. One of our aims in doing this is to illuminate the concept of ‘event’ itself, a term which we have so far been using as though its meaning were self-evident.

In order to broaden the inquiry into other kinds of social action, and the role of speech, we must ask how and on what bases speech itself is constituted as a form of social action, alongside and in relation to others. The main issue we will be exploring in this chapter, then, is: how may we characterize the bases of Nebilyer social action? This leads us to examine the significance indigenously attributed to ‘events’ as occurrences which stand out from the ordinary flow of life-as-usual. We will show that there is something like a Nebilyer concept of event, which is strongly oriented towards the discovery or disclosure of new significance, both in large-scale public transactions, such as those we have analyzed in the previous chapters, as well as in everyday life, and that speech is crucial as medium and activity within the indigenously valued forms of social action in both spheres.

Part of what we seek to do by plumbing indigenous notions of event can be related to the concerns of Wagner (1975) and Strathern (in press), which we discussed in section 7.4.

In this chapter we will discuss some linguistic structures through which exchange events are constituted. The emphasis will be on the traditional forms of men's oratory – the structural patterns themselves. This will provide essential background for the following two chapters (6 and 7), where we will be concerned with situated uses of these forms, basing our analysis on transcripts of speeches made at three interrelated exchange events.

In trying to carry out the main task of this chapter – to describe a particular set of linguistic resources – there are at least two different ways in which we could proceed. One would be to start with given linguistic patterns or types, such as the indigenously recognized genre of ung eke ‘bent’ (i.e. figurative) speech, identify various instances of each type, and compare the uses of them across the range of contexts in which they are found to occur. This is the approach taken by Andrew Strathern in his (1975) study of the Melpa equivalent of Nebilyer ung eke, which he calls ‘veiled speech’. An alternative approach, which we will follow here, is to start with full transcripts of what was said at particular speech events of the relevant sort – public exchange events – identify particular linguistic devices which are used at them, to look for possible interrelations among the various devices and between the devices and their contexts of use.

The three events which comprise the bulk of our sample are compensation events which took place in July and August 1983, arising from the Marsupial Road War of 1982 (sections 1.1 and 3.2.2).

LOCATION, GEOGRAPHY AND REGIONAL POPULATIONS

Our field site at Kailge lies in the western Nebilyer Valley, on the eastern slopes of the Tambul Range (see Map 1). Varying in elevation from 1500 to 1900m, the Kailge area is frost-free and suitable for cultivation of a wide variety of staples and specialty foods: many varieties of sweet potato; bananas, cane, greens, maize, pandanus, peanuts, beans and winged beans, and taro. Tobacco is cultivated, usually in small mixed-vegetable or other plots near homesteads. Introduced specialty foods which are grown to a limited extent include tomatoes, carrots and cabbage. The higher locations across the Tambul Range to the west, though disadvantageous in their being subject to periodic frosts, are known to be more suited to cultivation of cabbage and European potatoes. Coffee, which grows well throughout the Nebilyer Valley, was introduced as a cash crop from the mid–1960s. The Tambul-side people with whom residents of Kailge have many close social ties cannot raise coffee at their higher elevations, a factor which appears to be related to notable imbalance between the two areas in women's marital destinations – that is, that more Tambul women marry into the Nebilyer than Nebilyer women do into Tambul (see section 4.2).

The Nebilyer Valley (see Maps 1 and 2) is bisected by the Nebilyer [Napilya] River, which rises on the south slopes of Mt Hagen and flows southwards, joining the Kaugel River at the Southern Highlands border (i.e. the old border between New Guinea and Papua). Until recently, the Nebilyer River was a formidable natural barrier which people crossed east of the Kailge area (in Kulka territory) over vine bridges, to which access could easily be restricted.

Alsatian

Historical situation

Until 1648 Alsace formed part of the Holy Roman Empire and the German language was used for all purposes. There were, however, two other major differences from the earlier history of France: during the late Middle Ages, as a direct consequence of their trading role, the Alsace towns acquired rather more independence from the feudal past, and hence control of their own destiny, than was the norm elsewhere; and in the sixteenth century Protestantism became widespread, as indeed it did in many of the German regions. The Thirty Years War brought about a transfer of the region to the French kingdom: after a disastrous and cruel occupation by Swedish troops, the Alsace towns appealed to France and the Treaty of Westphalia brought them under French protection in 1648. The Treaty was vague and diplomatic, but Alsace thought it had retained its economic privileges and its Protestant religion, and had neither given itself completely to France nor been wrenched away from a weakened empire by a rapacious France.

After France took control of most of Alsace in 1648, of Lorraine finally in 1766, and of the Strasbourg area in 1781, the region became part of France and was slowly assimilated into the French administrative system, a process in which the Intendants, representing the King's justice and his tax and financial control, played a strong role, and in which the Roman Catholic Church was supported in its attempts to regain power and influence.

Approaches and methods

SMALL-GROUP interaction, or the language use of primary groups in face-to-face situations, is a topic of much interest to philosophers, psychologists and sociologists as well as linguists. It is not surprising therefore that there exists a plethora of approaches and methodologies for analysing it, and for extracting from an example such as a conversation a range of different interpretations according to the purpose of the analysis. Since our concern is with the different ways in which French can be used, and the different forms the language can take, we shall attempt to avoid too much discussion of particular schools of thought and concentrate on the data, taking insights from different approaches as and where they seem appropriate to illuminate the variations in French language use which mainly concern us.

Three such insights or approaches are particularly helpful in this: the idea of the social network, which helps to relate language use to context, and two methods for analysing text itself: discourse analysis and conversation analysis.

The communication situation outlined in the previous chapter represents a setting for communication between a sender and a receiver, both located within a particular situation and each bringing to the exchange his or her own personality, experiences and social ‘persona’ (sex, age, class, race, geographical origin, etc.).

Age

IT would be logical to expect differences in life-style, employment, or political interests as between the generations to be matched by a difference in language use. The exact nature of language variation by generation varies with the passage of years, so the specific linguistic points noted in 1915 or 1945 as characteristic of the French ‘younger generation’ will be quite different from those observed in 1990. Some of the linguistic differences will correlate, not merely with differences of age, but with the different social realities facing the generations: relations between parents and children are not what they were forty years ago, and social change and economic realities have an effect on the nature of language even if it is only in the interpretation to be given to individual words such as chômage or cohabitation.

Sociologists generally feel that the intergenerational conflict which marked the 1960s in France has not continued: ‘All the surveys carried out among those aged below twenty show that young French people have in general few problems with their parents’ (Mermet 1985, 111). The need to establish one's own identity, to be different from one's parents, is perhaps therefore not so marked in the late 1980s and early 1990s as it was in the 1950s and 1960s.

Sociolinguistics

Langue and parole: system and data

Two complementary approaches are needed when we study language: we need to be aware of the raw data - what people actually say; and also aware of the underlying systems - the grammar, the sound system, how to classify words and expressions. The system can be described as a more or less abstract structure, whereas the things people say are best analysed as ways of behaving, subject to all the pressures of the moment and varying according to the situations in which people find themselves and the sort of people they are.

Language in use, the data, was labelled parole by Saussure and contrasted with the system, langue. Parole is the sum of all the variations used in a language, whether caused by chance or by (conscious or unconscious) choice, so some of the individual preferences, differences of pronunciation and selection of terms will correlate with a speaker's individuality and personality, his memory and physical capacities, his knowledge and experience, expertise in language use; others with aspects of the situations he finds himself in and the people he converses with.

Chomsky's term for this raw data was performance; his term for langue was competence. The competence of an idealised speaker/hearer is a systematised abstraction from the data, reducing them to order in grammatical, lexical, phonetic or phonemic terms and imposing both constraints and explanatory structures on real usage, rejecting some items as being ‘ungrammatical’ or ‘irrelevant’ to the analysis.